Is "K-Pop Hag" a Fair Term?

A fun little tidbit of an adventure happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I went to support my friend who was performing on stage for a K-Pop cover dance festival (shout out to you, Nat, please check out her YouTube channel here). There was a lot of modern songs and artists that were being performed during the show such as MEOVV and ILLIT. Then, out of the blue, the intro to AOA’s Heart Attack started to play and my ears perked up. I looked at my friends and saw that they had the same surprised but excited expression that I had. THIS was the K-Pop I enjoyed!

It was amusing to see that we were the only people in the audience who had this particular reaction. One of my friends commented that we had now become those aunties at parties who talk about how ‘old skool’ music was better compared to the new-fangled modern rubbish… but with K-Pop. We then started talking about what other artists would be great to see covers of and oh boy, we came up with some gems. Teen Top. Fiestar. B1A4. Rainbow. We even mentioned After School and lo and behold! A group had an After School performance. We were being catered to and I loved it.

Fast forward to about a week ago where I saw a debate on one of the (numerous) K-Pop subs on Reddit where a fan was calling out the disingenuous nature of a subsection of K-Pop fans stating that if you were over a certain age, you were too old to be enjoying K-Pop. This is a recurring argument where people claim that past a certain point in your life you should be “touching grass” and concentrating on your work, home, and family life and not care about K-Pop. They would (not kindly) call these fans “Hags” (which in of itself shows the sexist nature of the stereotype as it is solely focusing on female fans).

As a woman who is in her late 30s and has been into K-Pop for over 15 years, this is particularly targeted at me and my friends around me. When it comes to these fans who have these commentary posts on X/Twitter and TikTok, I have probably been a K-Pop or at the very least been aware of K-Pop longer than they have been alive. Do I care though? Of course not.

To dial it back to a social level, though… Being a teenager is honestly an awful time where your body is trying to sort itself out physically and mentally. You want to appear grown and have responsibilities but at the same time long for the comfort and familiarity of an adult figure. The world revolves around you because that is all the mental capacity that you have to be able to deal with all that is happening and the furthest you could extend the grace of caring to would be your friends and maybe your family. So if someone that you don’t know is supposedly enjoying the things that you enjoy but their set up is completely different to how you are, it feels almost out of place. Suddenly, its a threat. How dare you enjoy the things that bring me joy and comfort when you yourself are part of the societal group that has no connection to me whatsoever? The ability to rationalise has not fully developed yet, so what do they do? Lash out.

To them, having someone in their late thirties enjoying the same things they do seems weird because they don’t feel like they are able to connect to that person outside of the shared interest (and legally, they shouldn’t anyway) and a 30 year old is double the life span of someone who is 15, so of course they are going to call that person old because in their eyes they are old.

But are we though? Honestly, a lot of the blame has to lay with the media also where they often portray a music fan is someone in their teens/early 20s screaming and running after their favourite artists as they are trying to leave a venue by car. And while that image is indeed true, there is so much more to fandom than that. Artists and groups these days make their biggest profits by going on concert tours. The people who are buying tickets and the merchandise that they sell on those tours are adult fans, not teens. The ones who work jobs and have a (somewhat) disposable income and can make choices on what and how much they want to buy. The fans who fly to different countries to see their ultimate group are not teens. The fans getting VIP and barricade send offs for concerts are not teens. The fans participating in fan signs and fan calls are not teens. The fans registering for pop-ups shops for goods are not teens. That’s not to say that teens do not participate in these kinds of activities but for the most part, it’s going to be an adult fan.

These kinds of comments circulate on an almost annual basis and honestly, as I get older, I care less and less. The original people who make those assumptions grow up and either stop being a fan of K-Pop or continue but become more active. As someone who discovered this wonderful genre in my late teens/early twenties I have done more K-Pop related things in this single year alone than during my years at university. 

Granted I now live in South Korea but you get my point.

This argument is almost annual in terms of how many times it crops up on different social media platforms. All I have to say to that is this: if you are someone who feels targeted by the comments, don’t worry. Just enjoy the music and the fandom and continue to be a fan albeit in a safe and respectful way. If you are someone who are making these comments… just remember that in a few years, you will be the age of those fans you are calling ‘old’. Unless those people are actually being inappropriate towards you, don’t worry about it and let people enjoy what they want to enjoy.

It’s just music, man.